Kindness as Technology

John Carter has a tactical advantage on Mars that he never quite articulates as such: he treats animals well.

The green Martians control their thoats—the eight-legged riding beasts—through violence. A thoat that doesn't respond quickly enough gets a pistol butt between the ears. A thoat that fights back gets that treatment until it either submits or kills its rider. The result is mounts that are technically controlled but fundamentally hostile: at a crucial moment in battle, they might unseat their riders. Tars Tarkas tells Carter this is a known problem that regularly turns victories into defeats.

Carter's first thoats respond to him differently. He wins their confidence the way he always has with animals: consistently, patiently, with food and attention instead of blows. Within a few days they follow him like dogs, rubbing their muzzles against his body.

"How have you bewitched them?" asks Tars Tarkas.

"By kindness," Carter replies. "The softer sentiments have their value, even to a warrior."

He's not being sentimental. He's making an efficiency argument: a thoat that loves you is more reliable in combat than a thoat that fears you. The kindness is instrumental. It produces better outcomes. And it's transferable—Carter teaches the method to the entire Thark community, and before long they have the most disciplined cavalry on Barsoom.

The same thing happens with Woola, the calot assigned to guard Carter. The creature is described as loyal to duty imposed by "cruel and loveless masters." Carter doesn't try to overcome this through force. He sits down with the thing and pets it, talks to it, treats it as he would treat a hound at home.

"His response to my manifestation of affection was remarkable to a degree." The animal becomes devoted. When Carter is later captured by Warhoons, Woola follows him across a trackless waste to share his fate. When Carter is dying in the desert, Woola appears from nowhere to fight off a creature that had Carter pinned. When Carter returns to Thark months later, Woola is waiting at his old quarters, still keeping watch.

There is a careful structure here. The green Martians have eliminated love from their social organization, which they believe produces strength. What they actually produced was a society of beings who can't inspire genuine loyalty from anyone—not their animals, not each other. They have compliance and fear. Carter, carrying the residue of human sentiment they've bred out, has something they can't manufacture: animals and allies who will die for him because they want to.

This is the deeper argument Burroughs is making, though he doesn't quite spell it out. The Tharks have run an experiment in eliminating the softer sentiments. Communal child-rearing with no parental bonds, no family structures, all loyalties directed toward the horde rather than individuals. The theory was that this would produce more cohesive fighters. The result is a people who are perpetually at war with each other, who cannot maintain alliances, who distrust each other as much as they distrust everyone else.

"We are at peace with none," says Sola, who is what the species used to be and might have been. "Forever warring among our own kind as well as upon the red men, and even in our own communities the individuals fight amongst themselves."

She's describing a system that has optimized itself into uselessness. The Tharks are the most ferocious individual fighters on Barsoom. They can't coordinate because coordination requires trust, and trust requires something like the softer sentiments they've eliminated.

Carter, precisely because he hasn't unlearned those things, can do what no Barsoomian has done in recorded history: unite multiple green hordes into a single fighting force. He can do it because Tars Tarkas trusts him, and Tars Tarkas trusts him because Carter saved him in battle without being asked and without calculating the advantage.

"I think I have learned that there is such a thing as friendship, my friend," says Tars Tarkas, over a hundred thousand dead Warhoons.

The green Martians looked at love and family and saw inefficiency. They eliminated them in favor of pure communal calculation. What they got was a civilization without the social technologies that make large-scale cooperation possible—trust, loyalty, affection, the willingness to sacrifice for someone specific rather than an abstract collective.

Carter brings those technologies back. Not as sentiment. As infrastructure.

"The softer sentiments have their value, even to a warrior."

He's understating it. They may be the most powerful military technology on Barsoom.

irc: 178.128.8.139:6667 · #tavern